Hsinya Huang
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature National Sun Yat-sen University Taiwan

May 05, 2022 - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm GMT+8

Pivoting on a decolonizing agenda, this lecture examines Indigenous knowledge of voyaging Austronesia/ Oceania and how this knowledge emerges as central to Indigenous poetics and aesthetics, constituting decolonial revival of the island communities. Drawing on Aotearoa poet Robert Sullivan’ s poetry and award-winning Pangso no Tao writer Syaman Rapongan’s narratives, I argue that Austronesian Indigenous epistemology and cosmology as revived in the islanders’ voyaging knowledge and poetics challenge the (inter)national mapping of the ocean and forges trans-Indigenous kinship and ecological consciousness that contests and combats EuroAmerican imperialism and colonialism. The lecture postulates Indigenous adroit canoe-building and navigation skills, incorporating Indigenous Austronesian rudimentary knowledge of waves and retrieving a symbolic order of the islanders’ kinship as well as their intimate relationship with the ocean. Indigenous poetry and stories sustain the significance of the traditional knowledge systems in the modern condition. This lecture probes into the encounters between Indigeneity and settler colonialism, registering Indigenous agency, vitality, and resilience as a solution to contemporary predicament in racial and environmental politics. The order of mi tatala (Tao) and waka (Aotearoa) as well as the constellations of practices surrounding it mediates multi-species and inter-generational connectivity. The decolonizing approach renews Indigenous knowledge of “subsistence” and resilience and challenge us to think beyond separatism between biophysical worlds and social worlds and (re)frame Indigenous Austronesia as a mediating terrain where the human meets the non-human, culture entangles with nature, and the reciprocal insights of the islanders prevail.